Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
In 'A Confession,' Tolstoy found meaning that he could hold on to, and he lived for another 30 years.
Historical fiction was not - and is not - meant to supplant literature from the period it describes. As a veteran of the Crimea, Tolstoy wrote 'War and Peace' to match his own internal sense of the truth of the Napoleonic wars, to dramatize what he felt literature from that period had failed to describe.
In the summer of 1866, as Leo Tolstoy prepared for his serialized novel 'War and Peace' to be published as a single volume, he wrote to illustrator Mikhail Bashilov, hoping to commission drawings for the new edition of the novel, which he referred to by its original title,1805.
I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.
I like reading... French, Russian classics - Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf.
I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.
Chechnya forms the bookends to Tolstoy's career. He began writing his first novel, 'Childhood,' while in Starogladovskaya in Northern Chechnya, and his final novel, 'Hadji Murad,' is set in the Russo-Chechen War of the 19th century.
Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.
I had amazing intellectual privilege as a kid. My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five, I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother's homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' and the Koran. I was reading comic books, too.
